Abstract:

A speech act is an action performed by means of language. Speech acts are performed when we express an apology, greeting, request, complaint, invitation, compliment, or refusal. Empirical studies on speech acts show that the same speech act is very likely to be realized quite differently across different cultures. The purpose of this paper is to examine speech act of refusal to an invitation in English between university students in Malaysia. To this end, sixty Iraqi and Malay postgraduate students at Universiti Sains Malaysia were selected to participate for this study. The data were collected through an open ended questionnaire in the form of discourse completion task consists of situations with variations in contextual variables (i.e. social power and social distance). The data were then analysed based on Beebe, Takahashi and Uliss-Weltz’s taxonomy of refusal to investigate the preferred semantic formulas or the strategies used in refusal to an invitation in terms of frequency, sequence and content.  The findings indicate that the respondents prefer to use more indirect strategies (e.g. excuse and regret) than the direct ones (e.g. No and negative ability) in expressing refusal to an invitation. It is hoped that the findings have implications for comparative cross-cultural and intercultural communication studies.

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